Housemates
by Checkerboards
Summary: The sequel to [Get Out of My House!] Jackie's survived her encounter with the Riddler...so far. But he's not the only rogue in Gotham...
1. Another One?

It is said that there are two kinds of people in this world - good and evil. It is said incorrectly. There are actually a little under seven billion kinds of people in the world, each of whom occupies their very own position on the spectrum of morality.

It was all relative, anyway. When considered against the entire population of the Earth, the Riddler's position would seem to be dead in the black. But when placed against his peers, suddenly he found himself occupying the opposite end of the spectrum. He didn't kidnap (well, often, anyway), or kill on a whim, or warp minds into obedient mush (something that all too many of the others were guilty of). For a world-famous supercriminal, he was practically harmless.

Which was probably why Jackie Baker was still alive and in one piece. If any other rogue had wandered into her apartment, their meeting would have been over in a matter of seconds. Bam, dead, hey look, she made dinner! But since it had been the Riddler, things had turned out a little differently.

For example, instead of lying dead in an alley somewhere, Jackie was lying quite comfortably on the Riddler's overstuffed green couch watching the Wheel of Fortune marathon on channel four. Instead of a traditional villainous monologue regarding her imminent death or his imminent plans for world domination, the Riddler was telling stories of the various encounters with Batman he'd had through the years while he flipped popcorn into his mouth one-handed. (On the other hand, instead of having a home of her own, she had a burnt-out wreck courtesy of their rather unfortunate game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey, but that was old news nowadays.)

"Origami Swan Lake," he said as Vanna White tapped a single G.

Jackie stared at the screen. It read "O--g---- S--n ----". "How do you _do _that?"

"Practice," he said smugly, flipping another kernel of popcorn into the air. Instead of landing neatly in his mouth like all the others, however, this one caromed off the bottom of his nose and ended up perched cheekily on his lapels.

"Right," she drawled. "So anyway, you were saying?"

"Hmm? Oh, right. So there was Batman, fighting the five assassins while I took the scroll out of the display case. I knew I didn't have long, because I'd only gotten five assassins-"

"Wait a minute," Jackie interrupted. "Five assassins at once and he _still_ beat them? He must be indestructible!"

"You have no idea," Eddie sighed. "You should hear the theories. He's a robot, he's a clone, he's a robot clone, he's an alien, he's an alien robot clone - you're laughing," he accused lightly.

"Yeah, I am," Jackie snorted. "An _alien robot clone_?"

"That's one theory," he smirked, tossing another kernel of popcorn into his mouth.

"What's _your_ theory?"

The popcorn lodged firmly in his throat as he wheezed in shock. He didn't_ have_ a theory. What he had was an answer. Batman was Bruce Wayne, nothing but a billionaire playboy in tights with fists that could break bones. But obviously, he couldn't _tell_ anyone that, not unless he wanted to spend even more quality time staring at the ceiling of Arkham's infirmary ward.

He swallowed hard. "I need a drink," he coughed, hurrying out to the kitchen. He took his time with getting a glass of water - the longer he waited, the longer he had to come up with some way to stop talking about Batman. Finally, armed with a selection of new topics and a glass of water, he returned to the living room.

Jackie had moved. She was still half-submerged under the huge green afghan, but now she was perched nervously on the edge of the couch, watching the door with nervous eyes. "Someone knocked," she informed him.

He sidled up to the door and peered through the peephole (which was technically a periscope-like device built into the wall just _beside_ the door to avoid unfortunate things like too-clever thugs waiting for the light in the peephole to be blocked by a head before opening fire). A familiar thin man, arms crossed, stood tapping his foot on the doorstep.

"It's just Crane," he said, somewhat relieved.

"Who?"

"The Scarecrow," Eddie said nonchalantly, opening the door a crack. "Hey, Jonathan-_hey_!"

Jackie dove underneath her blanket as Crane neatly shouldered Eddie out of the way and strode into the lair. "What do you want?" Eddie said, resting his water glass on a handy stack of magazines.

Crane favored him with a scathing look. "You have corn on your shirt," he informed him.

Eddie scowled and flicked it off. "Well?"

"Have you seen Jervis anywhere?"

"No, I haven't. Why? What did he do?" Eddie asked, noticing that part of Crane's traditionally sour expression was fueled with anger. On the couch, the blanket-covered ball that was Jackie peeped hesitantly through a fold of her cover at the fearsome Scarecrow (or, rather, the not-quite-so-fearsome-at-the-moment Jonathan Crane).

"I don't want to talk about it. He's here, isn't he?"

"Why would he be here?" Eddie asked, perplexed.

Crane sighed and patiently explained. "He's not at any of his old lairs. He's not at the Iceberg. He's not at that ridiculous Wonderland display in the park. He had to have come here!"

"I repeat, _why_?" Eddie said.

"You play chess together in Arkham," Crane accused, "and that latest riddle of yours sounded like something he'd write, so he's got to be here somewhere."

"In case you've forgotten...no, you weren't there, were you?" Eddie asked, thinking back to his last meeting with Tetch.

It had been in an ill-advised session of group therapy at Arkham Asylum. The group leader had, for some reason, picked that day as the day that the Riddler's psyche would be shredded bare in front of the lion's share of the rogues' gallery. He picked and pried and prodded about riddles and their insignificance in the modern world until Eddie was just about ready to pop.

And then Jervis had spoken up with that damned so-called 'riddle' - why is a raven like a writing desk? - and the psychiatrist had thanked him for his contribution._ Thanked him_ for quoting a meaningless bit of nonsense when Eddie's brilliantly constructed riddles were discarded as so much useless wordplay!

When Jervis had smugly smirked at Eddie, he'd lost it and they'd ended up in a full-fledged fistfight in the center of the circle. Eddie, while swinging Jervis around by the neck, had accidentally smacked Mr. Scarface from Arnold's hands and sent the dummy flying into the Joker's face. The dummy's splintery hand left a wide red cut across the clown's pale white forehead. The Joker leaped eagerly into the fray, and before long the entire room had erupted in a gleeful slugfest. The final injury count was six black eyes, two dislocated shoulders, countless bruises and thirteen individual wounds requiring stitches.

They didn't do group therapy at Arkham after that.

"Anyway, we're emphatically not on speaking terms at the moment," he finally said to Crane.

"Oh, really?" Crane asked softly, a dangerous glint in his eyes. "Then who is _this_-" He darted to the couch and flung the blanket off like a showman revealing the Next Best Thing in Cars.

Jackie yelped and stared up at Crane, wishing very hard that she was wearing more than just a set of Eddie's pajamas. His eyes narrowed with disbelief. "_Another_ one, Edward? How many girls do you think you need?"

"She's not...I...she's just a _friend_," Eddie spluttered.

Crane sniffed superiorly. "Right. I'm sure you needed someone to keep you company since your other three _friends_ ended up in Stonegate." Jackie tried to twitch the blanket out of Crane's hand. He flicked it out of her reach.

"She's not...all _three_ are in Stonegate?" Eddie was genuinely surprised. Apparently the qualifications for legal insanity were getting harder to leap over.

"And_ very_ unhappy to be there, too," Crane gloated. He considered Jackie over the rims of his spectacles. "So what are you calling this one? Query mark 5?"

"She's just a _friend_!" Eddie snapped.

"She's in your _boxers_," Crane retorted, pointing a slender finger at Exhibit A.

"That's only because she doesn't have any clothes of her own!"

A wicked grin flitted across Crane's face. "Oh _really_?" he inquired delicately, making Eddie's face go completely crimson for the second time in as many days.

"Because he burned my house down," Jackie explained.

"I did _not_!" he protested.

"This habit of yours of picking up strays needs to stop, Nygma," Crane advised, ignoring them. "The last three haven't exactly boosted your standing among the rogues. And this one doesn't even look the part," he added, looking over Jackie's less-than-perfect frame.

"Well, at least I can _get_ girls!" Eddie snapped, losing his temper. "When was the last time _you_ had a henchgirl?"

Crane scowled. "If you see Jervis, let me know," he growled before storming out of the lair. Eddie firmly locked the door behind him and permitted himself one deep sigh.

"What a jerk," Jackie huffed as she snuggled back into her blanket.

"He's always like that," Eddie said absently, trying to figure out what else about the conversation had bothered him. "I wonder what Jervis did."

"What riddle was he talking about?"

_That_ was it! "I haven't written anything that sounds like Jervis. Ever," he said firmly. "There must be another copycat out there."

"A copycat?"

Eddie sighed again as he settled back into his seat. "New criminals come to town, and they see how successful the rogues are, so naturally they think that all they have to do to make it is to grab a gimmick. Generally, they try to grab mine." His eyes rolled. "The only ones that lasted more than two minutes were the Cluemaster and the Puzzler. Oh, and the Quiz, but she just stole my color scheme."

The words _who would want it?_ popped into Jackie's mind, but she managed not to say them. "Do they try and copy anyone else?"

Eddie shrugged. "There's Catwoman and Catman, Firefly and Firebug, not to mention the whole Clayface pyramid scheme..."

"Never the Joker?"

"No one's stupid enough to rip off the Joker. He'd rip them apart." Which, of course, led him to start thinking about what exactly he was going to do to this new upstart once he got his hands on him. As far as he was concerned, Gotham had room for one puzzle-based villain, and it was him.

He savored another crunchy, salty bite of popcorn. He'd finish his snack, he'd go find a copy of this new riddle, and then he'd devise a delightfully difficult deathtrap for this new deviant. If he escaped, Eddie would leave him alone. If not, well, that would just prove that the new guy didn't belong in Gotham anyway. "Spilled Milk Teeth" he said absently, glancing at Vanna White's line of mostly blank squares on the screen. Now, where had he left that cache of copper wire...

(to be continued)

* * *

_Author's Note: Of course, in another universe, Crane _does_ have three very devoted henchgirls...but sadly, it's not my universe. Eddie's adventure with the scroll is in Legends of the Dark Knight #185-189._


	2. You're Getting Tetchy

The next two weeks passed in a flurry of plans and paperwork. Eddie had spent most of the time puzzling over a copy of the Jervisy riddle that had been printed in the personals section of the Gotham Times.

If it had been a normal, good riddle, he would have been able to figure it out. He was sure of that. But it was frustratingly amateur. For example, several of the words in the strange message were misspelled. Why? Was it an anagram? Was it a code? He tried every which way he could think of and came up with zilch.

Well, surely the crime it referred to would have been committed by now. He raked over the arrests pages, considering each one carefully before crossing it out with red ink. He'd gone through two entire red pens and six sets of newspapers, checking and re-checking them for any hint of a riddle crime. There was nothing, and all that time spent squinting at blurry newsprint was making his brain feel like an overcooked ham.

_What's white and black and red all over_? he muttered to himself as he crumpled one of the newspapers into a ball and hurled it across the room. _Answer: a waste of time._

"No luck?" Jackie inquired absently from the nest of want ads on the couch. She was still looking for a new place to live. Unfortunately, it seemed like the rest of Gotham was too. Every time she called a new landlord and gave her name, he brushed her off and said there were no vacancies. If she had been a conspiracy theorist, she just might have supposed that her ex-landlord was warning everyone away from renting to the crazy lady who burned her apartment down. (And really, it was a pity that she _wasn't_ a conspiracy theorist, because this was in fact the truth, and knowing it would have saved her countless hours on the phone. Do not anger the savage beast known as the Landlord's Association.)

The Riddler slipped on his jacket. "Someone's either looking for love or a plate of asparagus," he sighed. "I bet it's not even a real riddle," he added with one hundred percent inaccuracy. He gathered up his hat and cane. "I'm going for a walk. Try not to burn the house down while I'm gone."

"Very funny, smartass," Jackie said, sticking out her tongue at him. He smirked at her and clicked the door closed.

In point of fact, he wasn't merely walking, but checking on various supply caches around the city. Oh, and he had an appointment with Kittlemeier to pick up his new suits, and maybe he'd swing by that tasty Chinese restaurant for dinner...

* * *

Living on a couch can become addictive. It is surprisingly easy to adjust oneself to a new environment, especially when you know full well that you have nowhere else to go. The sheer lack of responsibility can be quite exhilarating. 

Likewise, it is just as easy to accommodate yourself to the whims of your host. It's possible to put up with just about anything provided that you're still allowed to occupy those three soft squares of comfort. With all this in mind, it should come as no surprise that Jackie had wiggled quite nicely into the routines of the Riddler's household.

As for the Riddler himself, well...She'd only lived in Gotham for one year, but in that year, she'd heard stories about the rogues. Well,_ everyone_ had a rogue story, it seemed, and everyone was eager to talk about it. She'd picked up the impression that rogues were unstable, violent, and flamboyantly insane.

And this was, for the most part, true. But the important thing here is that it was not true all of the time. One cannot be flamboyantly insane and at the same time manage to survive on one's own. It just doesn't work. It could be argued that the rogues had two modes, if you will: Barking Mad and Slightly Crazy. In other words, they saved the true insanity for when they were out on the town, masked, costumed, and in their element. The rest of the time they were just...well..._people. _Slightly obsessive, distinctive, weird people, to be sure, but people nonetheless.

The Scarecrow had barged in and glared at her. He'd insulted her, he'd ignored her, and he'd stolen her blanket...but he hadn't killed her. He hadn't even gassed her, something which she'd vaguely assumed he did as often as anyone else would smile at passersby.

In other words, he'd behaved like a reasonable, logical human being. Well, a reasonable, logical _jerk_ of a human being, but still - _not_ a raving lunatic. Not a homicidal maniac. She had considered leaving the lair after that incident, and then had asked herself - why? He didn't do anything. Why had he left her alone? He hurt other people, all the time...ah. That was it. He hurt _other_ people. He hadn't hurt her because she was with the Riddler. She was off-limits.

On the whole, she'd prefer to stay that way. Besides, she was out of places to call. She tossed the last sheet of newspaper down onto the couch and got up, swinging her arms high above her head as she tipped backward in a much-needed stretch.

The smell of something foul greased its way up her nose. She coughed and followed it into the kitchen. Oh, that _smell_...it was probably the dirty dishes in the sink. As if they knew where they were, they had covered themselves with a bright green mold that almost perfectly matched the décor of the place.

Jackie slowly began to roll up her sleeves. If Eddie could face down Batman, she could certainly face down a watery pool of filth or two.

* * *

Eddie re-entered the lair, a dry cleaner's bag full of question-marked suits over his shoulder, a bag of exploding question marks and a bag of Chinese food nestled in his free hand. As he juggled his purchases and clicked open the puzzle lock, he sang a happy little song to himself. 

"The terror of the galaxy, and that's why she's the girl for me! My baby is the destroyer...of...worlds..." he trailed off as his eyes informed him that something was very, very different. The bag of suits slithered unnoticed to the floor as he wandered through the lair with wide eyes.

He could see the carpet. He could see the _carpet_! The magazines were gone. The moldy dishes were nowhere to be seen and the stainless steel of the sink shone like a mirror. The untidy snowstorm of papers they'd left were _stacks_ now, in neat little piles. The dust on the TV screen, where Question had squiggled 'Clean me' with a greasy finger, had vanished! And the whole place smelled suspiciously of lemons.

Jackie emerged from one of the bedrooms. "Hey," she said tentatively.

"You cleaned?" Eddie asked, a look of wonder on his face.

"Yeah," she said cautiously.

"You_ cleaned_?"

"Is that bad?"

"You _cleaned_!" he beamed.

"Yes," she said slowly, "you said that."

"..._thank you_!" he finally sputtered.

"It's the least I could do after you let me stay here for two whole weeks. I have a question, though-"

"Yes?"

She pointed at the kitchen counter, which was piled high with crumpled green fabric. "What the hell happened?" she said simply.

Eddie raised an eyebrow. "They're just my old suits," he shrugged.

Jackie dug in the pile and pulled a certain jacket out. She held it up, glaring at him through the gigantic bloodstained slash in the back. "Let me ask again. What the hell happened?"

"Oh,_ that_," Eddie said dismissively.

"Yeah, _that_. Or that-" she pointed at another jacket, this one missing a sleeve, "or that," a jacket that looked like it had been run through a cheese grater.

"**A damn tidbit**."

"Huh?"

"Batman did it," he translated, waving a hand at all of the destroyed costumes. "That's what happened."

"You're telling me that Batman stabbed you in the back?"

"No," he said. "I'm telling you that Batman threw me through a window and I landed on a very sharp piece of glass. What?" he asked when her eyes widened with shock. "It happens to everyone."

"What about that one?" she asked, pointing at the sleeveless jacket.

He furrowed his brow. "I don't remember. Really, it's no big deal," he said. "I mean, we've gone through it hundreds of times by now. I throw him a riddle, he throws me out a window. It doesn't matter which time he cut my back or what day he broke my legs-"

"He broke your _legs_?" Jackie interrupted.

Eddie laughed. "He's broken just about every bone in my body, pumpkin. It happens." He gathered the jackets up and stuffed them into the garbage can.

"It shouldn't."

"Well, it does."

There was a frantic hammering noise at the door. Eddie set the food and the little explosives on the countertop and went to answer it. "Anyway, it's fine," he assured Jackie, who couldn't believe that he had such a cavalier attitude toward severe injuries.

Eddie eased the door open a few inches and was promptly smacked hard in the face with it as a panicked Jervis Tetch skidded into the room. "Get out of here!" Eddie growled.

"_There's some enemy after her, no doubt,_" Jervis pleaded. "_That wood's full of them_."

"Batman or Crane?" Eddie asked.

"_It's the crow_!"

"He was already here once, looking for you," Eddie informed him with sadistic delight as he shut the door. Jervis bit his lip and checked the corners of the room for sackcloth. "What did you do to him, anyway?"

"_A secret, kept from all the rest, between yourself and me_," Jervis muttered conspiratorially before leaning closer. Sometimes, if he concentrated really hard, he could manage a few words in normal English. Eddie fervently hoped that this was one of those times. The last time Jervis had related gossip in Wonderlandese, it had taken him a full ten minutes to puzzle out the hidden meaning: that Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy were seen getting a little _too_ friendly at the Iceberg one night, which Eddie had already known. (In fact, he'd been there at the time, a memory which warmed his...let's call it his _heart_ on those long winter nights in Arkham.)

They were in luck. "He wears bunny slippers," Jervis confided with an air of revealing top-secret high-security mysteries.

"Oh, that. How does that involve..." Eddie paused. "How many other people did you tell?"

"_No one._" Eddie crossed his arms and gave Jervis a knowing look. "_Four thousand two hundred and seven, that's the exact number_," Jervis admitted.

"Everyone, then," Eddie sighed. "No wonder he was so angry at you."

Jackie tentatively poked her head around the kitchen doorway. "Hi," she said, waving a pair of chopsticks in greeting.

Jervis sniffed the air hopefully. "_Tis a privilege high to have dinner and tea along with the Red Queen, the White Queen and me_!"

Eddie's eyes glinted with malice. "You can come to dinner when you answer me a riddle, Jervis..." Jervis straightened up, ready to make any sacrifice for the sake of won tons. Eddie leaned closer with a truly evil grin stretching across his face. "_Why is a raven like a writing desk_?"

Jervis's mouth hung open. "_I say, this isn't fair_!"

"Don't blame me, blame Lewis Carroll," Eddie said, getting ready to open the door again. "Goodbye, Jervis."

Jervis turned pleading puppydog eyes on Jackie. She returned a tentative smile. Rogue he might be, but no one could say no to a face like that. "Oh, let him stay," she said. "He's cute."

Eddie glared at her. "I'll let him stay when that riddle has an answer!" he snapped.

"Well, Lewis Carroll did eventually answer it, you know," she said. "_Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front_!" Jervis's jaw plummeted floorward in instant infatuation.

"_Tell me your name and your business_," he said in tones of adoration.

Eddie interrupted her as she was about to answer. "Her name is Jackie, and she's with me," he said severely, sending Jervis's hopes crashing all over the floor. "If you're staying, come on, it's getting cold."

"TETCH!" came a bellow from outside.

Jervis turned a magnificent shade of bluish white. "_Oh, dear_," he muttered, clearly wishing that Alice had had a few PG-13 adventures with the correct vocabulary.

The door rattled in its hinges. "GET OUT HERE!"

"Calm down," Eddie advised through the door.

"Get him out here _now_, Nygma."

"I'm not opening this door until you calm down. You tend to gas first and ask questions later," Eddie reminded the Scarecrow through an inch and a half of solid wood.

There was a pointed sigh from outside. "Fine. I'm calm."

"Fine."

There was a pause as Jervis and Eddie had a silent argument about opening the door. Eddie conveyed with a few swift gestures that it was _his_ house and he'd open the door for whoever he pleased. Jervis countered with something that translated quite nicely into "if you let him in here, I'm dead". Eddie shrugged and wiggled his fingers in a flapping mouth, indicating that if Jervis was going to gossip about the other rogues, he should take what was coming to him.

"Open the door, then," the Scarecrow hinted.

Jervis waved his arms desperately - no, no, no! - as Eddie flung the door wide. The Hatter's frantically windmilling arms tried to reassemble themselves into a casual pose as a fully-costumed Scarecrow stormed in. "I'd like to have a word with you outside, Jervis," the Scarecrow said, forced politeness barely masking the untamed fury in his voice.

"_I'll stay down here_," Jervis said, edging behind the couch.

"Get over here so I can rip your lungs out," the Scarecrow growled. Jervis declined his kind offer with a violent shake of his head. The Scarecrow approached the right side of the couch. Jervis darted to the left. The Scarecrow spun to follow and Jervis darted right again. "I'll teach you to tell other people's secrets-" he threatened, swiping at Jervis and trying to catch his coat.

Jervis's mouth, on autopilot, was reciting "You Are Old, Father William" as if it was the Lord's Prayer while Jervis himself frantically danced out of Crane's reach. "_I feared it might injure the brain_-" he gabbled, narrowly avoiding a close grab at his bow tie.

"Oh, it _will_," Crane promised darkly, slamming a thin arm into the air directly behind the Hatter, who yelped in dismay and scrambled to go in the opposite direction.

"_But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none-_" Jervis gasped, extracting a mind-control chip from his pocket, "_Why, I do it again and again_!"

The Scarecrow froze in mid-swat, a canister of fear toxin at the ready, as Jervis aimed the little chip at Crane's head, ready to throw it and take his mind over. They stood there silently for a few seconds, gasping for breath, ready to strike.

Eddie cleared his throat. "Can I just point out something before you gas him?"

"What?" Crane snapped, not taking his eyes off of Jervis.

"We already knew about the bunny slippers."

"_What_?" Crane bellowed, shifting his glare to the Riddler. "Who told you, if it wasn't _him_?"

Eddie let a tiny, tiny smirk creep onto his face. "You did."

"_**What**_?"

"Last winter, in Arkham, when the psychiatrists had you drugged to the eyelids. One day you stood up and told everyone that your feet were cold and that you wanted your bunny slippers."

The skin around Crane's eyes, barely visible through the holes of the mask, was twitching in a toccata of rage. "I don't recall saying that," he said icily.

"Do you recall telling me that 'Mary Had A Little Lamb' was your own personal philosophy of life?" Eddie asked brightly. "Or that you believed Killer Croc was really a robot stuffed with styrofoam peanuts and cotton candy?" The canister of fear toxin was slowly rotating in the air to face Eddie. "Not that anyone believed any of it," he added hastily. "Well, until now."

"They were left at my lair by a test subject," Crane snarled softly, "and they were warm and they fit. Just because they happen to look like rabbits-"

"I don't care what your slippers look like!" Eddie lied. "No one does!" No, certainly no one would be chuckling into their drinks tonight at the Iceberg at the thought of Professor I'm-So-Dignified Crane shuffling around his lair with little pink bunnies on his feet. Of course not.

"Obviously_ he _does, or he wouldn't have bothered to tell everyone about them!" the Scarecrow retorted.

"Well, you can't gas him here," Eddie said reasonably.

"Why not?" Crane growled. Jervis's eyes crossed slightly as the fear toxin canister blinked into existence half an inch from his nose.

"Because we're trying to have dinner!" Eddie snapped.

"Can't he just apologize?" The rogues' attention shifted to Jackie, still lurking in the kitchen doorway. She blushed and bit her lip. "I mean, you're sorry, right, Mr. Hatter?" Jervis, without taking his eyes off of the little canister of fear toxin, nodded enthusiastically. "So if he apologizes," Jackie continued, "would that help?"

"It would be a good start," Crane grumbled.

"_I'm very sorry you've been annoyed_," Jervis squeaked. "_I'm sure I'm very sorry_."

The Scarecrow glowered at him. "And?"

Jervis squirmed wretchedly. "_I give thee all, I can no more_!"

"I think that's as good as you're going to get," Eddie said.

Crane eyed him angrily, then stuffed the fear toxin back into his pocket. "If I hear any more rumors about me floating around, you can be sure that we'll have another little _chat_," he spat venemously.

Jervis nodded. "_Silence all round, if you please_."

The Scarecrow spun on his heel and stalked out of the lair, slamming the door shut hard behind him. The question-marked chandelier tinkled quietly.

Jervis turned a winning smile on Jackie. "_Let's fight till six, and then have dinner!_"he said brightly.

Jackie glanced at Eddie, who shrugged. The riddle had been answered, after all, and there was probably enough for three. "Sure. This way."

Jervis did a little whirling dance of happiness as he followed them into the kitchen. "_Then fill up the glasses as quick as you can, And sprinkle the table with buttons and bran: Put cats in the coffee, and mice in the tea -- And welcome Queen Alice with thirty-times-three!_"

(_to be continued_)

* * *

_Author's Note: The song 'Destroyer of Worlds' is by Tom Smith. If you like my stuff, you'll adore his. He's at www dot tom smith online dot com and he has free stuff to download. Yay!_

_Everything Jervis says in italics is a direct quote from either 'Alice in Wonderland' or 'Through the Looking-Glass'. I love you, silly little Wonderland-man, but you're a pain in the mome raths to write about._

_And Kittlemeier, of course, is the rogues' and the Bats' tailor, as seen in The Further Adventures of Batman. _


	3. Less Deadly Candles

_He walks with a cane and we want in/We want to be where Fry calls kin_

Eddie glared at the newest riddle as if it was a particularly loathsome species of insect. The new copycat in town had left this one on one of the giant LED billboards in the middle of downtown Gotham. (And they'd dared to put it in green and black, _his_ colors!)

_He walks with a cane_...well, that was easy enough, wasn't it? It was him. And obviously they wanted in on his shtick, otherwise why would they be leaving riddles everywhere?

_Fry calls kin_...now that sounded like an anagram to him, but none of the answers he was coming up with made sense. We want to be where frilly snack? We want to be where fall sync irk?

We want to be where narc fill sky? Well, it was possible, he supposed, wondering if it referred to the airbus transport system for convicts. But why would they want to be there? And why would they reference_ him_? He wasn't scheduled to fly out of town, certainly not in the hands of law enforcement, and there were no plans to ship him elsewhere if and when Batman ever did get him again.

We want to be where fans cry kill? Oh, yes, but which sport? And again, what did _he_ have to do with it? Whoever was coming up with these had no sense of style, or propriety, or even the sense to write a riddle that _actually made sense_! It was immensely frustrating.

Across the room, Jackie had taken over the couch. It was covered with stacks of insurance forms, notices, letters, and claim tickets. Doing the paperwork to cover her losses from the fire was almost as bad as losing everything in the first place! She wished once again that she'd had the presence of mind to grab her purse on the way out of the house.

In order to get a new driver's license, she needed a social security card. In order to get a new social security card, she needed a driver's license! The clerk at the DMV was convinced that Jackie had to get a learner's permit before she got her license (which was ridiculous, since she already _knew_ how to drive) and when Jackie pointed out that she'd lost her license in a fire, the clerk had told her that "Rules are rules".

She was currently in hour four of wrestling with state and national government websites, trying to find something she could reference in her next five hundred phone calls to get the whole mess sorted out. To top it all off, the ancient, battered laptop she'd borrowed from her boss crashed whenever she opened a second browser window. It was immensely frustrating.

So when the phone rang, both of them ignored it. The papers and websites in front of them demanded their complete attention and stopping to talk on the phone would result in another half-hour of work merely trying to pick up where they left off. The answering machine clicked into life.

"Why is this machine like a postman?" the Riddler's recorded voice said smugly. There was a pause in case the caller actually wanted to try and work it out. "They both need messages to work"._Beep._ "Jackie, hi, it's your Mom, I hope I've got the right number..." The disembodied voice on the answering machine cleared its throat as Jackie's head jerked upright in horror. No, oh no, they weren't going to... There were quiet rustling noises. "Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Jack-eeeeeeeee, happy birthday to you!" her parents sang in unison. "Call us back, honey! Love you!" her dad chirped happily. _Beep_. Jackie ducked her burningly embarrassed face behind the shelter of her laptop's screen.

"You never said it was your birthday," Eddie accused lightly.

"You never asked," Jackie fired back from behind her barricade.

He was already gathering up their coats. "Come on. We're going out."

"But I'm busy. _You're_ busy," she pointed out desperately, waving at the bits of paper spread out around where he had been sitting.

He sighed explosively. "If I have to look at that...that _gibberish_ for another minute, I'm going to want to hit something. Come on, it'll be fun. My treat," he enticed, tossing a green question-marked coat so that it covered her computer.

"I suppose I don't get to say no?"

"No," he grinned. "Come on, adventure, excitement," he enticed, pulling open the door.

"And really wild things?" Jackie asked, finishing the line that the Riddler didn't know he was quoting.

"Those too."

The Riddler was nothing if not true to his word. Getting a taxi proved to be an adventure, particularly when the cab drivers got near enough to recognize Eddie in his question-marked glory. And it was certainly exciting to stroll past the velvet rope of the club that Eddie had picked for the night's entertainment while a horde of envious would-be clubgoers waited in line outside.

However, matters (and Jackie) came to a screeching halt when they walked into the nightclub. It was mostly just a normal place - tables, a bar, a dance floor...okay, so it looked like a cross between the North Pole and something out of the 1950s, but that was tolerable. The thing that made Jackie's feet do a marvelous impersonation of immovable rock was the sight of a cluster of Gotham's most infamous rogues gathered in the best tables by the bar. _Really wild things, indeed._ "Uh..." she stammered as Eddie tugged her along.

"What?"

"You didn't tell me there would be other rogues here," she hissed as they got closer.

"You didn't ask," he said smugly. Besides, where else would he have taken her? More to the point, where else _could_ he have taken her?

* * *

No man is an island. Well, of _course_ not - very few men float in the ocean and grow palm trees from their backs. Most men, upon close inspection, do not consist of sand and dirt. There is a distinct lack of wild boars roaming through their underbrush (unless you've picked a very unlucky specimen to examine). 

What is generally _meant_ by the phrase is that no one is ever truly alone. There is always someone else who knows you, or knows _of_ you, and who would notice if you were to one day inexplicably vanish. And maybe they wouldn't _do_ anything about it, but they would notice.

Consider the rogues' gallery of Gotham for a moment - that snarling, madness-tainted school of piranhas lurking at the bottom of the city waiting for errant cows to wander by. Perhaps it doesn't make much sense that they would form friendships. Perhaps it doesn't compute that a loosely associated group of homicidal maniacs would ever get together for a nice chat over drinks.

Then again, it doesn't exactly make sense to send riddles to the police, or to dress in spandex to rob banks, or to rely entirely on a coin to decide everything. Life does not always _make_ sense, particularly in Gotham.

Besides, being a homicidal maniac does not automatically shut off the need for human interaction (other than the expected _stab-stab-stab_ variety). Even mad scientists have an Igor or two around to pass the time with as they stitch together Thing-That-Man-Should-Know-Not-Of-Number-Fifteen. Sometimes, it's nice to put the toxins away, hang up the mask, and have a nice, relaxing evening with the only people in town that can _truly_ understand you.

That the rogues' chosen bar happened to be owned and operated by a fellow rogue (in semi-retirement) was somewhat of a bonus. When you dragged in a shredded scrap of cape as a trophy, it was nice to know that the proprietor wasn't on the phone with the cops to turn you in, but with his suppliers, ordering you another bottle or two of your favorite beverage for free.

One might inquire why Batman and his cohorts would allow such a thing to go on. Why would Batman sit back and let the rogues have this little haven of sociality when he could conceivably shut the place down in under five minutes and throw the lot of them into Arkham?

If these questions are indeed crossing through your mind, you should take the time to also consider the merits of hidden microphones in a place full of liquids designed to loosen tongues and raise the volume of voices, as well as the ease of following a drunken rogue from a known rogue gathering place to an as-yet-undiscovered "secret" lair. Alcohol can be a crimefighter's best friend.

Alcohol can also be a rogue's best friend, particularly one who has a reason to celebrate. "Eddieeeeeeeee!" squealed a red and black blur as it catapulted toward the Riddler and Jackie. Jackie took a hurried step backward as Harley Quinn cannoned hard into Eddie, who caught her with practiced hands. Apparently this was not the first time she'd raced squealing at him. "Wanna hear somethin' nifty?"

"You're single again?" he teased hopefully.

She stuck out her tongue. "No, smarty-pants. Mistah J's still in Arkham. Ready?" She took a deep breath and grinned. "Red broke Bratgirl's arm!"

"How?"

"Well, Red was up in a tree, right? In the botanical gardens? And Batgirl swings up on one a those hooky things. So she's comin' up fast, like this..." Harley seized Jackie and molded her into a Batgirl-in-the-air-esque shape. Jackie, stunned and more than a little intimidated, let her. "An' Red's just standing there waiting, y'know, all serious and stuff...and then the tree branch whacks the Brat right here!" With an enthusiastic karate chop, Harley smacked Jackie right above the elbow. "Broke her arm, sent her down fifteen feet into the bushes. Whammo!" She put her hands on Jackie's shoulders and shoved downwards. "_Whammo_!" she repeated pointedly.

"Oh. Oh! Um..." Jackie stammered, obediently folding to the ground.

"Atta girl!" Harley beamed. "So anyway, Ozzie let us all have a round fer free an' Red's got pictures from the security cameras if you wanna see 'em."

"Maybe later," Eddie said, amused. He offered a hand to Jackie and swung her to her feet. "We've got our own reasons to celebrate."

"Yeah?" Harley's eyes sparkled. "Didja get a Bat too?" she inquired of Jackie, who mutely shook her head.

"It's her birthday," Eddie said happily.

"Yeah?" Harley said with even more interest. "Great! _Hey guys,_" she bellowed at the entire bar, "_it's Query's birthday_!"

"Which one?" came a shout from the group of rogues.

"His new one! C'mon, Q, let's party!" she said, cartwheeling back to the cluster of criminals.

"But I'm not a..." Henchgirl? Minion? "A Query," Jackie muttered to Eddie as they tailed the exuberantly drunk jester.

"Go with it," he advised. "Unless you want to tell them all your _real_ name..."

"Query it is," she said hastily.

* * *

Jackie hadn't been to a birthday party since she was ten years old. Consequently, she had no idea how much of what happened that night could be considered normal. 

Well, aside from certain things. She was pretty sure that normal parties didn't feature dancing greenery displaying printouts of a blurry little broken arm or a jukebox that appeared to be set to a constant loop of bubblegum pop love songs (Harley had blown sixty bucks in quarters setting it up, much to everyone's disgust). Normal parties, she was sure, had a guest list that was not solely comprised of people that were ludicrously insane or hideously deformed (and in some cases, both).

But other things made up for it. She'd expected to be a fish out of water among the rogues. After all, they were _rogues_. But they'd welcomed her with open arms. All of them had approached her and made some kind of overture of friendship, whether it was simply relating their favorite how-I-almost-killed-Batman story or buying her a drink. Oh, it seemed that _everyone_ wanted to buy her a drink and talk to her.

Jackie was unaware of it, but that was pretty much standard operation down at the Iceberg. It was possibly the only place that people like Two-Face or Killer Croc could chat with a pretty girl without the girl immediately running for the cops. (Not that Jackie was a _pretty_ girl, she was more 'cute' really, but the rogues would take what they could get.) Besides, they had all been in this business long enough to learn everything about one another. New henchgirls meant new conversations, which meant new opportunities to spread the word about saving the plants/unearth secret phobias and fears/demonstrate the fine art of squirting flowers and joy buzzers.

In short, she was a welcome change in the scenery. A welcome, very _drunk_ change in the scenery - she couldn't quite bring herself to say 'no' when the rogues ordered her drinks - but a change nonetheless.

And then Harley Quinn had declared it to be Girl Time and had dragged her off to sit at a table with Poison Ivy, Two-Face's girls Angelica and Demonica, and Roxy Rocket. They'd giggled and gossiped over a round of startlingly bright margaritas (dyed extra-vivid green both to celebrate Ivy's triumph and Jackie's birthday). They'd compared lime-green tongues and started an enlightening game of 'I Never'.

Jackie held her brimming margarita glass up and examined it in the cold, bluish light of the bar. "'S yer turn, Q," Harley chirruped, swirling the liquid around in her own glass.

Jackie considered the group of women at the table. A mischievous grin sparked onto her face. She hoisted the glass as if she was toasting and proudly announced "I never killed anyone."

The entire table groaned as they lifted their glasses to their lips. "I keep tellin' ya, Harls," Ivy complained, "we need to stop playin' this with the new girls."

"Hey, we beat _her_ when she was new," Harley slurred, waving at Roxy Rocket with her drink and sending a tidal wave of green sloshing over the table.

"Ah, shut up," Roxy grumbled. "Just cuz none of you know how to have _real_ fun..."

Harley threw a pretzel at Roxy. It bounced off of her nose and landed squarely in her drink. "Two points!" Harley crowed, throwing her arms up in triumph. The whole table burst out into raucous laughter.

If you had asked her, Jackie wouldn't have been able to tell you why she was laughing so hard. Oh, it was funny enough, particularly with the assistance of lots of alcohol, and the look on Roxy's face was priceless, but that wasn't it. It was the thrill of not being herself for an evening. She didn't have to worry about looking silly, because everyone here looked silly to some degree, whether it was intentional or not. She never had to worry about running out of things to say, because the rogues would gladly talk about their favorite subjects for hours on end and they were thrilled when she acted interested in what they were saying. She wasn't Jackie, lonely little code monkey. She was Query, sidekick to a respected man in the community. She _belonged_, even if it was only for tonight.

And then someone had started singing, and Jackie had blinked owlishly at the sight of a bevy of tuxedo-leotarded girls trotting out with a massive green cake topped with question-mark candles. "Happy birthday to you," they crooned in three-part harmony as they plopped the cake down in front of her. The drunken rogue women joined in, enthusiastically off-key. "Happy birthday to you!"

A handful of the other rogues, Jervis among them, swung around and joined in. "Happy birthday, dear Query..."

And Eddie leaned in over the flickering candle-flames and winked cheekily at her. "Happy birthday to you!"

"This's the best birthday ever," she said happily, equally drunk on alcohol and acceptance. With a tremendous _whoosh_ of breath, she blew the candles out. One of them tipped over into the icing.

* * *

"Show me the way to go home," Jackie giggled as they climbed out of the taxi. "'M tired an' I wanna go to bed..." 

"Lightweight," snickered Eddie, supporting her out of the car.

"Hey, you're drunk too," she accused, trying to remember how feet were supposed to work.

"S'true," he agreed amiably. They staggered away from the cab.

"Hey!" the driver snapped after them. "Aren't you forgetting something?"

"Oh. Yeah." Eddie reeled back to the open door. "What's...what's the difference 'tween a southern lawn mower an' a cab driver askin' for money?"

"What?"

"One gets hot inna shed, the other gets shot inna head," Eddie beamed drunkenly.

"You're crazy," the driver accused.

"An' you're an idiot," Jackie fired back. "Doncha know who he is? He's the Riddler!"

The driver paused for a moment to weigh his options. He could get out of the cab and extract his money from the drunken couple - Riddler or not, the guy looked pretty skinny - or he could just take the cash out of his own pocket.

A question-marked cane thwacked hard into the passenger window. Glass tinkled noisily down onto the sidewalk. "Don't ever call me crazy," Eddie fumed, readying the cane for another smash.

Ah. Discretion was clearly the better part of sanity. In a choking puff of exhaust fumes, the driver took off into the night.

"Showed him," Jackie murmured gleefully, kicking a spray of glass into the street.

"Yeah," Eddie agreed. Yeah, he'd showed him, all right. He was the best. He ruled the earth. The ruling Riddler, that was him...

They weaved their way inside. "Hey," Jackie said suddenly, snatching Eddie by the front of his shirt as he started to head down the little hallway toward his bedroom.

"What?"

"I had a really...really good time tonight," she said. "Thanks."

"Any time," he beamed. Jackie smiled and leaned in closer...closer...she was looking up at him with those big brown eyes, and it was making his throat feel like it was about to swell shut with joy...

And then she quietly passed out on his shirt front. He blinked muzzily at her. His brain was telling him through the fog of alcohol that this was not how it was supposed to go. Jackie mumbled something and snuggled in closer to his chest. He stood there for a moment, blinking, then walked her into the nearest henchgirl bedroom and laid her out on the bed. It only took him three tries to successfully pull a blanket over her.

He gazed happily at her as she slept. God, that bed looked comfortable...and his bed was so far away...well, there was room for two, right? An' she was a Query, yeah? So it'd be okay.

With a silly, drunken smile plastered on his face, Eddie rolled himself under the blanket. He stretched an arm over Jackie and turned the light off.

(_to be continued_)

* * *

_Author's Note: It's hard enough to write riddles without trying to purposefully make them terrible. Yarrgh. "Fry calls kin", indeed. I ought to be taken out into the street and shot._

_I did want to point out that there's a fairly elaborate explanation of how Ivy gets drunk floating around out there somewhere, though I don't remember where. It basically boils down to this: Alcohol's technically a toxin, and she's not affected by toxins. However, she can _control_ the toxins in her own body, so she can let herself get drunk if she wants to. (Besides, when does comic book science actually have to work?)_

_This chapter's been on my hard drive for weeks and it's finally done and posted a full day before my self-imposed deadline! Yay! Time to relax and kick back with anything but a lime-green margarita. Those things are dangerous. See you on Monday!_


	4. Repercussions

There are some people who can go out at night, consume prodigious amounts of alcohol, and rise before dawn the next day, clear-eyed and cheerful.

Jackie and the Riddler were not nearly so fortunate. It could be said that Eddie was slightly luckier than Jackie - _he_ hadn't had half the rogues' gallery buying him drinks - but his head still felt like a bass drum full of cotton wool. He grumbled, only barely skimming along the edge of consciousness, clutched Jackie closer to him and fell back asleep.

Jackie slowly surfaced from sleep a few minutes later. The couch felt so soft...oh, it was so _nice_ to lay here on the nice warm soft couch...

Warm? A bit more of Jackie's brain sat up alertly. The couch was soft, yes, but it wasn't _warm_. There was a draft from the front door that blew right into her face. Where had it gone? And the couch was too wide - where was the edge at the front that should have been digging into her leg? Why couldn't she hear the tin sign across the street creaking in the wind?

And why the hell was she being cuddled like an oversized teddy bear?

With instincts that owed nothing to logic and everything to blind panic, she executed a full-body thrash that would have done a frightened housecat proud. Eddie tumbled off of the bed to the right with a tremendous crash while she thudded hard on the floorboards to the left. She looked around with wild eyes. She was in a bedroom, a bedroom painted _green_, there were question marks everywhere and oh god what had she _done_ while she was drunk? She'd woken up in bed with the Riddler and oh _god_ what had she _done_?

And now, with the timing that always seemed to accompany these things, the hangover whacked her solidly between the eyes. She slumped into a miserable ball on the floor.

Eddie had stayed flat on the ground where he had landed, clutching his head with one hand and muttering something about never drinking again. Sunlight shone merrily down on him from a crack in the blinds. He grumbled wordlessly and tipped his head sideways to avoid it.

From his vantage point, a pair of dust bunnies framed Jackie's greenish face on the other side of the bed. Oh. Oh! He whipped his head around to examine himself. Pants? Yes. Shirt? Yes. Okay, so that meant that they hadn't...no, he didn't _think_ they had...no, they couldn't have. Besides, she was still in _her_ clothes from last night, so they didn't...not that he wouldn't have wanted to...er...maybe...well, he didn't _remember_ doing anything...then again, he didn't remember anything past the Penguin calling them a cab.

There was only one thing in this world that would make him feel human again. Gingerly, as if his head would fall off if he made too sudden a movement, the Riddler got to his feet and stumbled into the kitchen. He filled two large glasses with water, stuffed the bottle of Excedrin in his jacket pocket, and headed back toward Jackie.

He caught a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror as he passed and grimaced. Most corpses probably looked better than him at the moment. Well, he'd worry about looking like a human after he started to feel like one again.

Eddie slithered down to the ground next to Jackie, wincing as the impact jarred his tender head. "Morning."

"I hate everything," was the feeble reply somewhere from ground level.

"Drink some water. You'll feel better," he advised. There was no answer from the floorboards. "I have Excedrin..." he said invitingly.

Jackie slowly dragged herself into a sitting position and accepted the water and the medication. They sat in silence for a few minutes, waiting for it to kick in.

"Eddie?" Jackie finally asked, shifting uncomfortably against the bedpost.

"Hmm?"

"Why is my bra full of pretzels?"

Evolution does not always weed out every design flaw in an organism. In this particular circumstance, the lack of a separately evolved airway meant that the mouthful of water in Eddie's throat dropped into his lungs when he inhaled in shock. After he'd finished spluttering and choking, he managed to cough out "What?"

"Pretzels," Jackie said, fishing one out and examining it. "And my hands are green."

"Do you remember much of last night?"

"Not really."

Well, that was probably for the best. The six-way pretzel battle between the girls had gotten everyone involved banned from the Iceberg for a few weeks, including the Riddler and Two-Face as well as Hugo Strange (who was surreptitiously taking pictures from the corner). Eddie considered his ban a little unfair. Okay, so he and Harvey had each been cheering their girls on, but that didn't mean they were _responsible_ for any of the damage. It hadn't been _their_ girls that had screamed "Death from above!" and tried to climb the chandelier, after all. And it certainly hadn't been _them_ that had winged a flaming pretzel bowl into the liquor display behind the bar.

Though, come to think of it, it _had_ been Jackie who had first decided that margaritas might make excellent snowballs. Harley had taken a double fistful of limey slush directly to the face and had retaliated by...oh, _that _was it...emptying the few bowls of pretzels that were left down the collar of Jackie's shirt.

"You don't remember the pretzel war, then?"

"Pretzel war?" Jackie gave him a suspicious look.

"Well, you certainly enjoyed it at the time," Eddie smirked, leaning back against the mattress and closing his eyes. "I believe you mentioned something along the lines of having a rematch next year." And then the Penguin had kwak-kwaked them out the door, waving an umbrella furiously at them as they staggered into the street. (It was always wise to obey Oswald when he had an umbrella around. You could never tell what nasty little surprises might be lurking inside it.)

The Excedrin was definitely starting to kick in. "Breakfast?" he offered, standing up.

"Sadist," Jackie muttered, flicking a pretzel into the corner.

"Suit yourself."

* * *

The topic of what exactly had placed them in bed together that morning never came up during the rest of that day. They obviously hadn't done anything other than sleep together (_sleep_ being the operative word here) and each of them had privately decided not to mention it unless the other brought it up first. 

And so, after the hangovers had ebbed, it turned into a fairly normal day. Well, at least it _started_ to. Eddie went out to buy a paper after lunch and came home fairly dancing in the street.

"Good news?" Jackie asked, clicking away on the laptop from her belly-down spot on the floor.

"The Impossibottles are coming to Gotham!" he beamed, swinging himself onto the couch.

Jackie frowned. "I didn't know you were into music."

"Not a _band_," he dismissed, flipping open the paper to the relevant article. "It's a display of antique bottles with impossible contents!" He showed her a picture of a very small bottle containing a very large wooden arrow. "It's a perfect target!"

"Um...sure," Jackie agreed uncomfortably. A target. Um. She'd sort of forgotten that Eddie stole things. She'd heard that he could get kind of...well, _crazy_ about it. Well, at least he was being fairly lucid...

"The real showpiece is the Mining Bottle," he went on enthusiastically. "It was built three hundred years ago by a two-foot-tall man with no hands or feet!"

"...Right," Jackie said. So much for sanity.

"And it would be...it..." Eddie's eyes widened in astonished delight as a Great Idea struck him. He dug frantically into a handy pocket at the side of the couch and pulled out a little green notebook. He flipped to an empty page in the middle, snatched a pen out of his pocket, and began scribbling ideas.

"Eddie?" Jackie said tentatively. There was no answer. He was totally absorbed in his work. She bit her lip and returned to her game of Freecell, clicking cards automatically as she thought.

He was going to steal something. Could she talk him out of it?...no, that would be a stupid idea. Other people had obviously already tried that and it hadn't worked. She could point out that he was only going to get hurt if he tried this...no. He had to know that, and if having both his legs broken wasn't enough to dissuade him, nothing she could say would do it either.

This was the problem with having friends. Sooner or later, they always did something that she wanted no part of, and then she had to decide whether it was worth the trouble to stay with them. Of course, this was slightly more serious than the time that little Marcy Pratchett down the street had convinced her that it would be okay to paint the cat black for Halloween...the tongue-lashing she'd gotten for that would be nothing compared to what would happen to her if she kept hanging around with a...well...a supervillain.

She peeked over the top of her laptop's screen at Eddie. He was curled into a tight ball of thought, notebook resting on his knees, pen moving at slightly under the speed of sound as he filled page after page with anagrams and riddle ideas. A little pink dab of tongue stuck out at the corner of his mouth.

Hell. He looked more like a little kid writing a Christmas list to Santa than a psychotic criminal. She couldn't just _leave_ him. It wouldn't be right.

She popped up her Firefox window. The Internet could help. The Internet knew _everything_.

* * *

The Internet knew _nothing_. Jackie clicked the laptop closed in disgust. In four hours of research she'd managed to come up with only two ways to potentially get through this, and she wasn't quite sure about the legality of either of them. 

Eddie was still curled in the same position, even though his muscles must have been screaming with the need to move. The pen had slowed down, and he was gazing off into space with a look that clearly read "Eddie's not here. Please leave a message," stamped on his face.

His lips were blue. Jackie got up and quietly tucked a blanket over his legs. That draft from the front door was going to make someone sick someday.

She decided to make some nice, hot soup for dinner. Maybe the smell of food would snap him out of it. Unlikely, but you never knew...She headed off to the kitchen.

Eddie did notice the smells and sounds of dinner being prepared coming from the kitchen, but only as a set of distractions. He'd come up with some brilliant stuff - _fantastic _stuff - and now he was playing with anagrams just in case one of them turned out to be even more fantastic. This heist was going to be _excellent_.

"Impossibottle...Impossibottle...**Tipsiest bloom**. **Emboss it, pilot**. **Lest I spit** - " _**Boom**_. The door burst wide to reveal a very cross Batman accompanied by a swirling gust of icy fall wind.

Eddie yelped, tried to jump to his feet, got tangled in the blanket and fell off of the couch.

"Well?" Batman graveled, arms folded, as Eddie scrambled to unwind himself from the blanket that he knew he hadn't put there.

"Well, what?" he snapped.

"What's the game this time, Nygma?" Batman sighed, eyeing the living room for traps.

Eddie blinked, puzzled. "What game?"

Without saying a word, Batman pulled a green envelope out of his pocket and tossed it to Eddie. "This was found tied to the Batsignal two hours ago."

Eddie popped it open and scanned the badly-written text. The author had tried to combine anagrams, rhymes, and presumably a clue. What they'd come up with read more like Mother Goose on magic mushrooms. "No...no, this is _stupid_," he muttered. "Who sent this?"

"It wasn't you?"

Eddie looked disbelievingly down at the crude riddle in his hand before glaring at the Dark Knight. "No, it wasn't me," he mocked. "In case you didn't remember, I'm the _Riddler_, not the_ Stupid-puns-and-lame-jokes...er_," he finished lamely.

"Oh? Why is an orange like a bell?" Batman asked with a hint of humor in his voice.

"Shut up," Eddie snapped. "That was a long time ago."

"Not long enough, apparently." In one swift motion, Batman swept into the room, snatched Eddie by the collar, and slammed him up against the wall. "I'll ask you one more time," he growled. "What's going on?"

"That's what _I'd_ like to know," a furious female voice said from the vicinity of the kitchen. Eddie craned his eyes over to see Jackie, a spoon still in her hand, giving the Batman a death glare.

"Uh, now's not the best time," he croaked as Batman's fists tightened around his neck.

"Why don't you pick on someone your own size, you jerk?" Jackie snapped, stalking up to Batman and shoving him. It had just about as much effect as shoving a bag of wet cement. "He didn't do anything!"

He glared down at her. "He's the _Riddler_," he explained in a tone somewhere between gruff outrage and condescending arrogance.

"That doesn't mean he did anything recently."

"He robbed Gotham Downs almost a month ago and he assaulted a cab driver last night," Batman growled, turning his focus back to Eddie, who was trying to figure out a way to get back to the ground before his neck began to resemble a giraffe's.

There were some very interesting conclusions being drawn inside the head of Jackie. Okay, so the Riddler was a thief and a criminal and possibly a raving lunatic. But at the moment, that wasn't what she saw. Instead, she saw a nice guy, somewhat on the scrawny side, a guy that had taken her out for her birthday and who had been more consistently, well, _nice_ than most people she'd encountered in her whole life...and this charming guy was being half-strangled by a huge man wrapped in a bat costume.

But if he _was_ a raving lunatic (and he probably was, given that he needed riddles like other men needed air) then didn't he have some kind of protection against things like this? It seemed to her that if he really couldn't help himself, then hitting him wouldn't stop him any more than just telling him "No". Shouldn't Batman take it a little easier on him since he was sick? Given that Eddie was now turning purple from oxygen deprivation, she had the feeling that that wasn't how it worked.

Visions of all those shredded suits danced through her mind. She had to _do_ something. But what? She was armed with only a spoon, hardly enough to make a scratch on that very tough-looking body armor. But no, he was a _hero, _wasn't he? Oh, yes, and there were _rules_ about being a hero.

She thought furiously for a few moments as Batman leaned a little harder on Eddie's trachea. He was growling something about those new riddles, and Eddie was wheezing out that he didn't write them, he didn't have anything to do with them...

Time for Plan A. Jackie cleared her throat. The two men swiveled their eyes to look at her. "Listen, I know he's the Riddler, but he's such a **dear rotten guy**," she said, blinking innocently during the anagram. Batman glared malevolently at her - _does he do anything other than glare_? she asked herself wildly - and Eddie gaped at her, taken aback by her calling him 'dear'. She cleared her throat again. "And this **dear rotten guy** shouldn't go back to Arkham, y'know?"

"You're as delusional as he is," Batman growled, looking back to Eddie. When his gaze had left her, Jackie winked furiously at the dangling Riddler.

Eddie blinked for a moment. Did she...did she just anagram something? **Dear rotten guy**...what did that unscramble into...

Jackie sighed and dropped the spoon, letting it clatter noisily across the floor. "Then I guess I'll leave you boys to it," she said, stomping off toward the storage room. Batman glared after her for a moment, obviously torn between making sure she wasn't fetching a weapon and securing the Riddler. He opted for the Batcuffs.

Eddie was thinking furiously as the cold metal snicked around his wrists.**Attend roguery**? **Got dreary tune**? **Untreated or**-oh, goodness, no, she wouldn't have said _that_. **Get ready**...**get ready to**...

There was a tremendous crash from the storage room, followed by a piercing squeal. "_Ouch_!" Jackie howled. "Your stupid time bomb fell on my _leg_!" There was a further clanking noise. "Oh, god, it's gonna blow!" she howled.

With a true hero's sense of a damsel in distress, Batman dropped the Riddler. "Don't move," he growled before thudding off into the storage room.

Eddie waited until he'd turned the corner, then ran as fast as he could out of the building. **Get ready to **_**run**_, she'd said, and he'd be damned if he disappointed her.

* * *

"That's not a time bomb," said Batman icily. "It's a clock radio."

"Is it?" Jackie said innocently as Batman pulled a heavy crate off of her leg. "I couldn't tell. It is green, after all."

Batman glared at her. "Everything's green in here." He grabbed her hands and jerked her to her feet. "And by now, the Riddler's long gone, isn't he?"

"He shouldn't be. You did tell him to stay, right?" she blinked. If she were any sweeter, sugar would start crystallizing in her pores.

He glared at her, the anagram finally clicking into place in his head. "And _you_ told him to run."

"Prove it," she said.

He scowled at her. "You had better watch yourself. Henchgirls in this town don't last very long."

"I have no intention of being anyone's henchgirl," Jackie said loftily.

Batman's scowl drew a little deeper. Harleen Quinzell hadn't intended to be a henchgirl, either. He snatched up Eddie's discarded notebook and stalked back into the night.

* * *

And out in the streets, the Riddler ran. He still had a copycat to deal with, he had Batman on his tail, and he kept losing his balance because his arms were firmly cuffed behind his back. But for once, it seemed like someone was on his side, and that balanced everything out quite nicely.

* * *

_Author's Note: Men? Clock radio-I mean retreat, oh, the horror...ahem. Sorry. I quote a lot. Speaking of quoting, "Why is an orange like a bell?" is the very first riddle that appeared on the 1960's Batman show. A long time ago, indeed!_

_The Mining Bottle was built by Matthias Buchinger, who was a fascinatingly talented person with, indeed, no hands or feet - and yet he was a calligrapher, a musician, an artist and a magician. _

_You didn't think I was going to end it there, did you? Tune in next time for "Home Sweet Home", the third installment of the Jackie-and-Eddie saga. _


End file.
